Review: Samsung Instinct

Your music can be accessed with the music application. Since you can place a shortcut to the music app on your Favorites page, it is easy to get to. Opening it up brings you to a screen that resembles standard music phones' music players. You can choose from playlists, artists, songs, albums and genres.

At the very bottom of the screen are four buttons: MyMusic, Player, Store and Search. The MyMusic button is essential the home screen for the music application. This is where you cycle through your library to find music you want to listen to. There is also an options button here, that lets you sync music to a web account, scan the phone for music, set a password, etc. The player itself is fair enough. With a song selected, it will display album art in the upper one-third of the screen, with the track title and artist name at the very top of the screen.

There are two buttons that are floating in the middle of the album artwork, and they are the shuffle and repeat buttons. Hitting them does exactly what you expect them to do. The rewind, play and fast-forward buttons are at the botton of the screen. You can multitask and do other things while listening to music, but the player offers no EQ settings to choose from, or no options during playback. The volume toggle on the side of the phone is the only way to raise or lower the volume of the music. Incoming text messages or calls will pause the music, which will resume once the message alert is dismissed, or once the call is disconnected.

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You can access Sprint's Music Store directly from the player, which has been completely re-realized by Groove Mobile. It is much improved over the version of the Sprint Music Store that is available to standard Sprint phones. The user interface has been improved drastically, and the discovery process is a lot faster. It's easier to find and buy what you might be looking for.

Music definitely doesn't sound all that great if you use the Instinct's built-in speaker. Using your own headphones is the best option.